


Mystery and Intrigue

by GoldenGoddess12199



Category: One Piece
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Family Secrets, Father-Daughter Relationship, Growth, Mentioned Pregnancy, Original Character Death(s), Parent Akagami no Shanks | Red-Haired Shanks, Pirates, eventually?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:55:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24035455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenGoddess12199/pseuds/GoldenGoddess12199
Summary: She was just a girl from a small town in the West Blue, one with memories of some Before place but more importantly, trying to figure out how to honor her mother's last wish. With a new unknown starting in front of her and her mother's death behind her, she decided to let the sea take her instead.
Relationships: Akagami no Shanks | Red-Haired Shanks/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 21





	Mystery and Intrigue

**Author's Note:**

> I don't update regularly, and this story has already changed from the original, which was like some weird psychic thing, to this. IDK where I'm going with this, and I don't at all update regularly.

Becoming herself again was a strange feeling. 

She was in a dark cocoon of warmth, and she was content with her space. She was confused how she got there, though. Didn’t she die recently? There was clearly a moment in her mind when she was sure that she had died, memories of the pain, the fear, the pervading sense of darkness and numbness that had pressed down on her before there was nothing. 

And now, there was warmth and memory and confusion. Is this what death feels like?

She thought death was supposed to be cold, supposed to be nothingness, or heaven, or hell, not _this_.

When she felt the need to move, to stretch out, she pushed and kicked until she was satisfied, but there was always something stopping her from getting the full satisfaction of stretching out her limbs and her spine.

Sometimes, something would press back, but she wasn’t scared of this touch. She was sure she had felt it before.

She also heard a voice, and a constant beat sang through her very being. 

The voice was sweet, soft and kind, but she could never understand the words, only that they were for her comfort. 

Eventually, her new cocoon of warmth became too small for her to fit comfortably, and she became restless, irritable. She wanted the space to be bigger, or to have a new space entirely instead. 

And then there was a great deal of movement, something was pushing down on her, and then she was cold, so very, very cold. She got her first breath of air- _Did she need to breathe before the cold?_ \- and she let out a loud wail from the deepest part of her lungs. She cried and wailed and screamed her little lungs out until she was no longer cold and wet, and instead wrapped in something soft and put on top of something warm, something that whispered that sweet voice and made her calm. 

She finally fell asleep and was warm.

XXX

After many, many months of embarrassing confusion, she finally started to understand her situation. 

She had been reincarnated into another life, one with a mother with white hair who didn’t seem to know what to do with her and the craziness of some type of bar or tavern as her home. 

Her mother named her Yorla, Ashura D. Yorla to be exact, and stroked her red hair at night to put her to sleep. Beyond that, she knew little of the woman, and knew little about her new life. 

She was two years old when she realized that she was in a world that was not like her first one. Her first world was just _different_ than here, other in a way she hadn’t realized until she thought about it. There were strange plants and animals and _people_ here, but everyone else treated these as normal things, and so did Yorla. 

Her memories of Before were scattered and a little distant, like remembering a vivid dream where some of the details get a little lost but fun parts of the dream were still there. It was like that with her memory, and it was very strange. 

But she didn’t say anything, and she grew up learning about the world around her, reading and asking questions to grown up who passed through the tavern. Anyone came, from high-ranking Marines to notorious pirates, and everyone in between. 

The owner, who was a strong lady called Petra, didn’t allow for any funny business. You drink, you eat, you pay, you leave. Those were the rules, and if someone didn’t follow the rules, Petra would hit them with a heavy bat. If that didn’t work, she would shoot them. She almost got attacked by some pirates, but the rest of the workers had gotten good at defending the place with her. 

Yorla’s mother, Lola, was a young girl when she started working there, and she was only seventeen when she got pregnant. Her father was a pirate that had charmed Lola for two nights of her company, and she liked to tell Yorla about it. 

“He was kind.” she said. She was sitting by a fire in their tiny apartment, keeping warm from the blizzard that was raging outside and making it impossible to go out. “He made me feel special, even though I knew he was just passing through. He was skilled too. Those two nights were some of the best of my life, and he gave me you, in the end.”

She would poke her in the tummy and kiss her on the cheek as a six-year-old Yorla sat in her lap, and she giggled at her mother. “That tickles, Mama!” the little girl said. Lola just grinned at her and gave her another kiss.

“His name was Shanks. Or, at least, that’s what everyone called him. I don’t know if that’s his real name or not anymore. Apparently, he’s become a pretty big name pirate, after he left for the Grand Line recently.”

The name stirred something in Yorla’s mind, a memory that she couldn’t quite grab on to. She knew it had to have been from the Before, because she got this type of feeling only from the memories from Before. 

“I have one of the newspapers with his bounty in it. I paid for an extra when I saw the headline, just to have one to keep, to have a picture of him.” She grabbed a piece of paper from beside her and held it up for Yorla to see. It was a man with the same red hair as her, with three gashes over his left eye and a small smirk as he looked away from the camera. 

He looked kind, for a pirate. 

The picture really tugged at her memory, and while she knew this was “Red-Haired Shanks” (as listed on his WANTED poster), she didn’t know _why_ he seemed familiar. Was it because this was her father? Maybe, she wasn’t sure, but she grabbed the poster anyway and studied it. 

Yorla turned to her mother. “Thank you for showing me, Mama! Someday, I’m gonna be one of the bestest pirates, and I’m gonna meet him, and tell him ‘hi, my name is Yorla, and you're my Papa!’.” She threw both of her hands into the air with a big smile, and her mother just watched her with a little smile. She didn’t say anything, but she kissed Yorla on the forehead instead. 

This was her little signal to let Yorla know it was time for bed, and being the good daughter that she was, she laid down and fell asleep without any fuss. 

Before she fell asleep, her last thought was _I’m going to meet you someday, Papa. I promise_.

XXX

When Yorla was twelve years old, her mother started acting strange. She would start coughing and gasping and heaving for breath, holding her chest like she couldn’t breathe. It made the little girl worried, but her mother would only smile at her when she asked if she was okay. 

“I’m fine, Yorla, just a little something stuck in my chest.” And her mother would run her fingers through her hair like she usually started doing, and Yorla would smile back at her, just slightly disbelieving. 

She grew worried when her mother sat her down, and the following conversation made her forget all about that worry (it was firmly replaced with embarrassment).

“Yorla, you’re getting older now, and your body is going to start to change. I knew I wasn’t really prepared, and I want you to be more prepared than I was.” Her mother was looking at her seriously, and Yorla could feel dread start somewhere in her elbows and work its way to her throat. She had heard Petra laugh about this from time to time, and some of the other kids in town would groan about their parents giving them ‘ _The Talk’_. Is that what this was?

“Your maturing, going through puberty, you’re going to start your period, be interested in people in a new way-”

Yorla could feel the dread from her elbows behind her eyes now, and she very nearly started to cry. This was exactly ‘ _The Talk_ ’, and she did not want it at all. However, there was no stopping her mother when she got like this, so she had to endure it. 

An hour later, Yorla finally ran out of the house with her face set in a red flame of embarrassment. Her mother had gone into all kinds of detail that she didn’t need or want to know, all about sex and puberty, and it was Too Much™. Her escape was a much needed relief in all of this nonsense. 

Weeks later, however, Yorla was firmly reminded of her mother’s worrying bouts of coughing and gasping, as it got much, much worse. There was a day when her mother had to sit down because she couldn’t breathe, and her face was turning a little blue. She couldn’t catch her breath all day after that, or the next, or the next, and from then on she only got worse. 

There came a day when her mother did not have the strength to get out of bed. 

By then, Yorla had taken on most of her chores. She cooked, she cleaned, she helped Petra from time to time in the tavern, but most of all, she looked after her mother whenever she could. She would read her stories, or make new ones up entirely, anything she could do to keep her awake and entertained while she laid in bed. 

There were also days that her mother talked, as much as it pained her, and Yorla cherished these moments. Her mother’s voice had died out with her ability to breathe, so she didn’t hear her voice much anymore. 

“Yorla, one day, you’ll meet Shanks, and when you do, I want you to make him remember you. I want you to let him know that you exist, that he has a daughter. You two might not even see each other again, but I want him to know that you’re a part of this world. Will you do that for me?” Lola held out her hand, and Yorla eagerly took it. 

“Mama, of course I will. I’ll make sure Shanks knows I exist, and that you were my Mama, and that he’s my Papa. As soon as I meet him.” She smiled at her mother, who gave her a weak smile back.

There was a ball of worry in her chest, but she let it be. She couldn’t just demand to know why her mother never tried to find her father, why he never came back to the island if he apparently came back for the mead so often that he and her mother were friends. She didn’t berate her mother for not going to a doctor, because there were no doctors here and they had no way to pay even if there was. 

She didn’t open her mouth and ask her questions like she wanted, didn’t pester her mother more than she did to eat and sleep and wash properly. 

Two days passed and suddenly she was sitting at her mother’s bedside, who hadn’t woken up since she spoke of her father. Two days, and then she was no longer sitting at her mother’s bedside, but sitting in Petra’s tavern, crying her eyes out and heaving and sobbing as the rest of the town came to mourn her mother’s death. 

XXX

It was big news that Lola had died. She was a bit of a town favorite, one of the people everyone who visits the island sees and one of the people everyone knows and loves. Shore Town was small as it was, but _everyone_ knew Lola, and, by extension, everyone also knew Yorla. They gave their condolences, gave beris to help pay for the funeral, gave food and supplies and kind words and books and all manner of gifts, anything they could to help Yorla. 

It was heart-warming to see everyone try to help her, and she would have appreciated it, but her mother’s death made everything seem gray and bleak. Yorla found herself suddenly uninterested in life, uninterested in Mrs. Marley’s tearful condolences and the tight grip the old woman had on her hands, or the beris she pressed into her grasp as she drifted away. 

Everyone and everything seemed very far away from her, like her ears and her eyes weren’t working. 

_‘Why is it so quiet_?’ she thought to herself. The noises of life were muted to her ears, and she found herself drifting through her own mother’s funeral with barely a tear to shed. 

The actual funeral passed in two hours, from start to finish. The town had rallied together to start the process, and her mother’s ashes were firmly in her grasp as they all drifted away. She didn’t know what to do with them; she didn’t know the first thing about what to do with her mother’s ashy corpse. 

It was that thought that pulled her away from the fog she was in, just a little, and she dropped the clay pot her ashes were in. 

It shattered when it hit the ground, sending the ashes flying in all directions and being sent on with the wind. In a panic, Yorla dropped to her knees and started to gather her mother’s ashes into her arms, but the more she grabbed at them, the more they fluttered in the wind, settling away from her and going who-knows-where in the breeze.

She sat in the road there and cried, screamed and cried and let out her grief, but it certainly wasn't enough. Nothing was going to be enough to fill the great chasm in her chest where her mother belongs (belonged) that was now bereft and empty.

She wasn't sure when, but Yorla eventually ended up at home, her and her mother's little apartment in the middle of town, a second-story walk up. She laid in her bed, but it was tucked in a corner of the room that her and her mother shared.

She can't remember how many nights she spent awake, staring at her mother's body as it struggled to breathe in the night air, but still so glad that she could hear the signs of life that her mother kept struggling to make. Her heart throbbed and ached in her chest when she remembered, so she resolutely turned around and refused to look at her mother's bed.

XXX

Petra came looking for her a day later, finding her sleeping in her bed, firmly turned away from her mothers.

“Get out of bed, girly. Things are still needing to be done. The more you move, the better you’ll feel.” Petra pulled her covers away from her shoulders, but Yorla barely moved. “C’mon now.”

But Yorla still didn’t move. She didn’t even really hear Petra, barely felt the cold when her covers were ripped off. All she could hear in her head was her mother’s last request. 

_Will you do that for me?_

Her mother had probably known her end was coming. Didn’t animals go to the forest to be alone and die in peace? Maybe that was what she had been doing, gently pushing her daughter away from her, to the other parent that she had out there. 

The only problem was that her other parent was a pirate, one known to go to the Grand Line and other parts unknown on the five seas, who had no way to be contacted and little way to be found. 

Absently, Yorla pulled her covers back over herself and fell back asleep, exhausted from crying and thinking.

XXX

Exactly seven days after her mother died, Yorla heard shouting in the street. At first, it was the only thing that pierced through the fog in her mind. 

The shouting was loud, a raucous sound that made her angry. 

Who did they think they were, whoever was shouting, that they could be so loud when Yorla was so sad? _Didn’t they know you were supposed to be silent around those who are grieving so they can pretend they’re dead too?_

Yorla angrily got out of bed, letting herself sit up and open the window. “Oi, stop with the shouting!” She yelled. 

The shouting stopped for a moment when they heard who was shouting back, but the obvious excitement and joy of the people never left. It hit Yorla like a truck that she was just laying inside, doing nothing, when there was a whole world outside. 

There was a firm thought in her head and her heart that this wasn’t something that her mother wanted for her, to be cooped inside like this while the rest of the world went on living. 

She reluctantly dragged herself to the bathroom, where she cleaned herself up and got a good look at herself. 

Her eyes, the gunmetal gray pools that they were, were flat and red and _sad_ , downcast in a way that she was not used to. Her cheeks were sunken and hollow, and her abdomen was about the same. She hadn’t eaten anything in days, and her water intake was laughable at best. 

She guzzled cup after cup of water and dug into the food her mother’s mourners had left, getting herself ready for the day ahead. 

She was out on the street and only a couple doors down from the tavern when she happened to overhear an interesting conversation, and likely the source of all the excitement earlier. 

“Did you hear?” One lady asked, holding a small fan up to try and be conspicuous. 

“No, what is it?” Another asked. There was a small gaggle of them, all congregating on the side of the street.

“Red-Haired Shanks is here again. Someone said that he was going back to the Grand Line, but he had to come back for Petra’s homemade mead!”

“Well,” a third lady said. “Everyone comes here for Petra’s mead. Even the Marines come and make special orders for it!”

She was right; Petra made her mead from ingredients on the island, and water from the iconic lake in the center of the island that Lake Island (where they currently were) was named for.

Yorla ran the conversation over in her mind, and she realized why it made her stop. Red-Haired Shanks was here?

With a gasp, Yorla took off towards the Lake’s Mead, Petra’s tavern, like her life depended on it. 

_‘I can tell him’_ , she thought. _‘I can tell him, and then I can join Mama, wherever she went_ ’. 

But when she opened the door and caught sight of the man sitting at the bar, her words died on her tongue.

Because sitting there at the bar was her father, the notorious pirate Red-Haired Shanks, with his entire crew and the kindest smile she had ever seen on his face. This was less the face of a pirate, and more of a man that was free. Free from the strict laws of the island, free from the grief of the unknown, free from burdens that followed here on land.

He was older than in his pictures, his form a little more filled out, but his face was still the same shape. He had a thin mustache over a full mouth, and gunmetal gray eyes that matched her own almost perfectly. Her hair and her eyes and her mouth were all like his, a crossover from father to daughter. 

And here was a face that stirred up her memory, made her dredge up thoughts of the Before that she had not thought of in so long. Here was Red-Haired Shanks, and somewhere else, Monkey D. Luffy wore an iconic straw hat. 

(She was distracted by her thoughts. _Where did that come from? Who is Monkey D. Luffy?_ )

Her hesitation made Shanks and his crew turn to her looking her over curiously. The words were stuck in her throat, her tongue glued to the roof of her mouth. She couldn’t do it, couldn’t do the one thing that her mother wanted. 

“Are you just going to keep the door open or are you coming in, lass?” Someone next to Shanks asked. It was an older man, with hair that was graying at the temples and wrinkles that made him look like he was watching over a bunch of children. He almost looked out of place among the carefree pirates, but he was relaxed and he had a mug of mead in his hand, so he was at least a patron of Petra’s.

She opened her mouth, relaxing herself to say it, she desperately wanted to say it, but her mouth and her brain just weren’t connecting. She spoke, but they weren’t the right words.

“Let me join your crew.” She said loudly. 

The general din of the tavern stopped as everyone looked at her. The captain of the Red-Haired pirates looked curious, but overall not rather serious. 

“Excuse me?” He asked, after a moment of awkward silence building in the empty tension.

“Let me join your crew!” She repeated, louder this time, as if he didn’t hear her the first time. She stared him in the eye, unflinching at his hard look, unmoved by his unimpressed stare. Her mother’s death had hardened her, and where once she would have cowered, now she stood tall. 

She was all she had left.

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter Two is kind of in the works


End file.
